


gained so many memories

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-20
Updated: 2008-07-20
Packaged: 2018-10-16 00:46:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: you can't search for love and expect to find jack harkness.





	

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

\- Evelyn Waugh,  
Brideshead Revisited

  
It’s with a gasp of breath and a stream of curses that Ianto realizes he’s in love with Jack Harkness.  
Tangled in bedclothes Jack’s never seen before, his fingers scrabbling for purchase on the mattress, on Jack’s shoulders, on anything, he lets loose with something he’s never known before and almost too late remembers to keep the words in his throat, swallow them down the way he swallowed Jack only hours before. They’re a prayer and a curse, unuttered and unutterable, a brief moment of weakness. He and Jack are not supposed to fall in love. There are _rules._

Rules that say the teaboy and the boss shouldn’t spend so much time together, rules that say once you betray someone you shouldn’t be let in again. Rules that deny pain, pleasure, passion – rules that tell Ianto when to brew the coffee and when to replace it with tea, when to put biscuits on the saucer and when to take more time than usual to kiss Jack in his office with the blinds drawn, unheeding of who sees. There are always rules, and Ianto always follows them. Except for when he doesn’t. But today he should, today he will.

Jack has rules about love, rules about stasis. Jack has rules about sleeping the night and rules about lube in a pocket of every garment of clothing; rules about the right music to dance to and rules for Ianto to follow when they go out for the evening. Jack is as much a stickler for rules as Ianto himself, come to think of it, and as they thrash wildly again, searching among themselves for lips, for tongues, Ianto realizes that Jack himself has never come undone with Ianto watching. It must be another one of his sodding rules, he thinks, and grips Jack’s biceps hard enough to bruise a normal man.

Hasn’t he ever thought of letting go, falling into the cool grass and letting the world bring him to tears? Hasn’t he ever considered that each of his thousand lives should be lived fully, and that with each and every lover a future can be built? And should be? Or perhaps that’s just Ianto with his fuddy-duddy twenty-first century ideas about monogamy, faith, family. Things too straight-laced and stiff for even Jack, master of the manual for living without death. He has an eternity, why not _use it?_

But it is clear to Ianto, even as he skims his knuckles over Jack’s cheekbone, brings his face close for a lengthy, tempting kiss, that Jack enjoys these rules, these necessary orders. And if he’s unhappy, Ianto will just have to keep searching for the garden of Eden. Jack is an impossible thing, dangerous and desperate, and because of that, there are rules.


End file.
